Kenneth Turan

Even decades after it was written Beirut is as relevant as it is entertaining, and it is very entertaining indeed.

While Chappaquiddick sheds some light on the proceedings, the film leaves us feeling, as Kennedy intimate Ted Sorensen (Taylor Nichols) puts it, "history has the final word on these things," not Hollywood.

What happens to Charley, the film posits, the bad and the good, is not so much the fault of specific individuals but of the indifferent dead ends built into America's despairing culture of the underclass. Your heart goes out to this striving, yearning young man, and that's a tribute to the fine filmmaking on display.

While many familiar tropes are present, including murder, mayhem, a tough lawman and a tentative posse, Thornton uses them to tell a 20th century outback story and offer sharp, pointed commentary on relations between whites and indigenous peoples.

It's all strangely wonderful, and it will take your breath away if you give it the chance.

Though this film is simple to summarize, to understand and experience the powerful emotional charge King in the Wilderness conveys, it simply must be seen.

Warm without sacrificing integrity, pleasant but not to a fault, Back to Burgundy is satisfying rather than earth-shaking.

Its plot is complexity itself, but its "kids save the world" soul is simple and earnest as opposed to earth shattering. With apologies to Bill and Ted, it's an excellent adventure, and let's leave it at that.

Final Portrait is quietly involving, amusing in a shaggy-dog-story way and impeccably made.

A plethora of pleasures are hidden under the deceptively mundane title of The Opera House. Nominally a documentary about the creation of New York's half-century-old Metropolitan Opera House, it turns out to be a charming and convivial celebration of not just the building but also opera in general and creativity across the board.

Thorough, impressive and smartly put together, joining dynamically edited verite footage with a series of thoughtful interviews, Breaking Point serves a pair of interlocking purposes.

Even if some things have changed, spending time with an artist who's concerned, as he's said in interviews, with "the permanence of temporary objects and the temporality of permanent objects," is always worth the journey.

Iannucci's take-no-prisoners directorial style is perfect for this blackest of farces.

Because of that private connection, Hondros is definitely a personal documentary, with the loss and pain Campbell is still experiencing taking center stage more often than might be ideal. But that connection also leads to some detours that might not have happened otherwise, sequences that show what made Hondros special as a photographer and a person.

Simultaneously effective and uninspired, Red Sparrow is successful in fits and starts. A perfectly serviceable spy thriller, it inevitably leaves behind the feeling that a better film was possible than the one that made it to the screen.

Experiencing Beast of Burden's inept dialogue and uninspiring direction on screen is a continual trial.

Whatever else you think about Marx and his ideas, it's hard to imagine him as hot-blooded and young. Director and co-writer Raoul Peck, as it turns out, not only understands those contradictions, he is committed to embracing them, which is what makes The Young Karl Marx the audacious, engrossing film it is.

A droll romp through prehistoric times, filtered through Park's beyond antic imagination.

Made with its subject's cooperation and talking to people like comrade in arms Gloria Steinem and Allred's daughter, fellow attorney Lisa Bloom, the film allows us, at least to a certain extent, to get behind the public persona to the private person.

Though the sequences of the actual heroism on the Paris-bound train are fully as crisp and involving as you'd expect, the other sections of the film, intent on demonstrating how undeniably everyday the three participants were up to that crucial moment, fall regrettably flat.

Energized to a thrilling extent by a myriad of Afrocentric influences, Black Panther showcases a vivid inventiveness that underscores the obvious point that we want all cultures and colors represented on screen because that makes for a richness of cinematic experience that everyone enjoys being exposed to.

Like the best of dreams, familiar yet wondrously different, On Body and Soul adroitly mixes recognizable cinematic tropes with extraordinary ideas that are very much the filmmaker's own.

While it doesn't pay to think too hard about the plot, after four of these films, director Collet-Serra, shooting here on a 30-ton set put together from authentic discarded railroad scrap, is an expert, so to speak, at making this kind of train run on time.

Bening has done a remarkable job of capturing Grahame's look and her breathy way of talking, insuring that her performance is real and using it to explore still-relevant issues of aging, glamour and relationships.

An increasingly disturbing film, it offers no relief for its central character, or for its audiences for that matter. Akin was inspired to tell the story by real-life political events in Germany, and his skills as a filmmaker are such that escape from this unsettling film is not in the cards.

Though its theme of the corrosive influence of unimaginable wealth is not exactly news, "All the Money" benefits, in much the same way that Scott's similar (and underappreciated) "American Gangster" did, from the director's expertise at bringing pace and interest to stories he cares enough about to sink his teeth into.

The Post is the rare Hollywood movie made not to fulfill marketing imperatives but because the filmmakers felt the subject matter had real and immediate relevance to the crisis both society and print journalism find themselves in right now.

Once feared dead but found instead only sleeping, the western has sprung back to strong and compelling life with the intense, involving Hostiles being the latest case in point.